Video over IP for Handhelds

Mobile TV is currently a topic of highest interest for consumer electronics and mobile communication. Several systems like DMB, DVB-H and UMTS/MBMS are competing for this new service. The DXB project with its partners IRT, Siemens, Sony, T-Systems and Vodafone, which is co-ordinated bei Fraunhofer HHI, has developed a proposal, which harmonizes these different systems by introducing a common Internet Protocol (IP) layer. As a result, the DXB consortium proposes an extended DAB system (eDAB), which offers the highest degree of commonalities with DVB-H and MBMS.

At IBC 2006 a live server with 16 TV programs will be demonstrated, whose signals are transmitted in parallel over DVB-H, eDAB and UMTS.

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Hardware/Software IPs for DVB-H Terminals

Mobile devices such as mobile phones or PDAs are used more and more for multimedia applications, e.g. for the reception of multimedia content via DVB-H, DMB or UMTS. In contrast to the demanding requirements of these applications in terms of computational power and memory space most mobile terminals are built around embedded processors. Therefore specialized software components and hardware accelerators are the key enabler for the successful implementation of multimedia applications.

The HHI provides numerous hardware and software solutions for video and audio coding, such as H.264, MPEG-4, MP3 and AAC+.

At IBC 2006 the HHI will show several DVB-H/DMB implementations, including a software-based PDA solution, a hardware-accelerated DVB-H/DMB development kit and a mobile DVB-H receiver ready for the market.

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Multi-Projection

Multi-Projection is an immersive projection technique (panorama projection) for digital cinemas and events, which should convey a realistic (immersive) impression. This technique allows to project electronic movie pictures in large size and high resolution. The typical large screen projection with overlapping of multiple single projections has been dramatically improved through absolutely field adjusted synchronization of any given number of sections as well as a transition- and stripe free blending of the horizontal and vertical arranged projectors. The modular concept helps to realize user specific formats and at the same time to reduce amount and expenses. The features are implemented in hardware called Cinecard.

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Video Formats Conversion

HiCon is a high-quality, multi-functional video converter for conversion of interlaced and progressive video and graphic signals to a variety of multimedia formats including the digital broadcast formats standardized by ATSC (USA), DVB (Europe) and ARIB (Japan). The conversion is performed by motion estimation and motion-compensated spatial/temporal interpolation which is known as the high-end method. To cope with the disadvantage of implementation costs, slim algorithms based on new important features have been designed. The beneficial relation between complexity and quality offers a wide range of multimedia applications like flicker free TV, high resolution flat panel TV screens, smooth motion cinema with large screen projectors and high-quality video-on-desktop.

Scalable Audio/Video over Heterogeneous Networks

Media delivery should appear to producers, transporters and users as simple as delivery of water through pipe systems. The M-Pipe approach towards fulfilling that vision is to provide methods of local, autonomous, and low-complexity media adaptation to the given network conditions, user preferences, or terminal capabilities without complex interaction and end-to-end signaling. Fraunhofer HHI contributed the initial design of the scalable video coding (SVC) extension of H.264/MPEG4-AVC which is currently going to be standardized by ITU-T VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG.

At IBC 2006, the performance of a standard media delivery system will be compared with a system incorporating the M-Pipe philosophy of local adaptation and scalability throughout the various media delivery subsystems.